1. 2011-01-27

    Heroic Auteur : A profile of David Lynch, by David Foster Wallace for Premier magazine, written during the location filming for ' Lost Highway '.

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  2. 2018-01-05

    I am a fairly sanguine UK rail commuter. I do not understand why they schedule the annual price hike for exactly the same week the holiday maintenance work is likely to have overrun, affecting all the services. Surely it would make more sense to raise the price at the start of the financial year, in April?

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  3. 2011-01-20

    "I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Most often two of these qualities come together. The officers who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Those who are stupid and lazy make up around 90% of every army in the world, and they can be used for routine work. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!"


    Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord , who clearly knew a thing or two about staff management

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  4. 2018-01-04

    Old Street station has a popup "Black Mirror" shop. I am not sure how I feel about this. I am fairly sure I know how Dan Ashcroft would feel about this.

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  8. 2018-01-02

    Bought some shoes, in the rain

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  10. 2011-01-04

    That's 2010 all done then. 2011 said alound still sounds implausibly futuristic to my ears. One more sign that you're an old man.


    The 'holiday season' was surprisingly survivable. The nut roast didn't poison anybody. I doubled up the recipe quantities, and had exactly 50% left after dinner was done. The main problem I had was getting all the vegetables evenly done. There was much shuttling trays in and out of the oven, and from shelf to shelf, but everyone went away fed and uncomplaining, so I'm going to chalk that up as a success.


    It turns out that having a 1 year old daughter is an excellent diversion around this time of year. Most of my time seems to have been spent chaperoning her around various relatives' houses, where she excelled in capturing the centre of attention. She's unsurprisingly done terribly well for presents. Typically, her favourite seems to be something inessential; a tiny gift teddy bear that was part of a seasonal book bundle.


    I have a nice new coffee mug with a picture of Moominpapa on, of which I am already fond. Also notable, a comic strip book that frames the life and work of Bertrand Russell as an analogy to a classical greek tragedy. Better than it sounds, it's quite a fascinating piece.


    2010 has been a pretty good year I'd say. Mostly full of Ada , who has grown from being a rather sickly baby whose inability to keep food onboard, or sleep to rule frazzled nerves, to a largely reflux-free, sleep-friendly and entirely enchanting toddler. I think my Ada high-point of the last year would be when I taught her to high-five people, whenever she was being carried at shoulder height. She's currently showing signs of becoming a precocious chatterbox. Other than that, there's been the career gear-change, moving to work for last.fm , which has been almost entirely awesome. The new job brought a house move to London, which took me through the stages of ambivalence, active dislike of the place, right through to my current state of mind, which is settled back into an easy enjoyment of the appeals of city living. The fly in the ointment there is the lingering unsold Bristol house, dealing with which is going to feature heavily in the new year, I suspect.


    Usually, at this time of year, I'd do some sort of summary of the year in music. 2010 has been a year where I've been kept pretty out of touch, because I've simply been too busy with other things. So most of the new discoveries I've made have been anything but current. Like everyone else, I became briefly overexcited about Janelle in the middle of the year. Standouts would be finally getting around to listening to Spirit Of Eden , and falling for it predictably, discovering The Books and Field Music , and my most unusual acquisition Sia's 'Some people have real problems' album, which I wouldn't have expected to have been my thing, but really captivated me. Luckily last.fm did a chart thing of my annual listening (a subscriber-only feature).


    Having an infant at home has really curtailed the gig-going, so I had to focus on quality, not quantity. I did Primavera again, and I don't seem to be tiring of that yet, I've already bought tickets for 2011. I saw an astonishing Dirty Projectors show at the Barbican, performing ' The Getty Address' completely, accompanied by Alarm Will Sound . I finally got to see the New Pornographers with Neko , which was good enough to keep a stupid grin on my face all the way through the first hour, even though I was coming down with a stupid cold. I think I'll probably get more opportunity to see things in 201, but surprisingly I'm not really complaining.


    Here's to 2011. Still sounds wrong.




    Suggested listening


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  11. 2011-01-03

    Posthumous : 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy' by Jack Torrance.

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  12. 2011-01-03

    Don't Track Us : I've been using DDG as my default search engine for over six months now, without any perceivable loss of utility.

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  14. 2017-12-31

    I've been writing a couple of things in hy again this week. What's Hy? It's a cute idea. It's a lisp that compiles? (transpiles? I never get the difference) to the Python AST. I guess the elevator pitch might be something like clojure but for python. So yeah, a rich, super stable class-tree sort of OO language, with enormous portablility and twenty-odd years of library support for everything you might want to do, but with a nice, dynamic, lispy language and a repl.

    I've played with hy a little bit on and off over the years. Actually, when I was working at SMR, I actually deployed some in production. (Somehow, I doubt that's still a thing). Python is my go-to scripting language, because it's very plain, very portable, batteries included, somewhat modern, probably already installed everywhere I work. I try to use it for scripty things, rather than shell or perl or something. Lisps are my favourite programming language. I just like how it fits together. I know lots of people don't, and I'm fine with that, but I always enjoy it.

    So over the holiday weekend I found myself wanting a couple of almost throwaway scripts, and I decided to reach back into the hy bucket, and give that another try. I wrote a script to grab my selfie tweets from a twitter archive, and a rough script to publish formatted micro-blog entries directly from the shell.

    It was a fun exercise. Hy has moved on a bit since I last tried. (They seem to have removed let, and car, and cdr, and lambda which I feel funny about), but by and large it works really well.

    Things I like

    • I like mapping over lists of things, and in straight Python this is often clumsy and leads to densely nested comprehensions
    • actual lambdas!
    • Python3 support ( hy3 )
    • easy importing of python modules
    • mostly seamless python interop
    • repl works great
    • the repl shows you the pythonic syntax of the forms it evaluates, which is helpful if you know Python
    • emacs mode (obv)
    • it has lazy sequences
    • and multimethods!
    • it is fun to work in

    Things I like less

    • Missing some olde lisp things like car/cdr/lambda
    • Things often expect you to be using methods on stateful objects, which gets you an OO impedance mismatch (I have the same problems in scala and clojure)
    • Slightly more typed than you expect, whilst not really offering you a type system. (Particularly with distinctions between lists, sequences, iterators.)
    • it often seems easier to imperative loop with for than map / reduce / filters, and this seems weird.
    • i don't feel I have any understanding about setv variable scoping.
    • no STM, which I think is one of the most interesting things about clojure
    • I don't think the error handling does restarts and conditions and things

    Summary

    I don't think I would choose to use it to build any complicated systems. (Typically this is true of Python as well to be fair). I'd love to see something like an idomatic web framework in it. I could imagine using it to build serverless workers over something like apex up or chalice perhaps. I should totally try that!

    I am not really very good at it yet, so I doubt I'm writing optimal programs. My scripts often look like Dr. Moreau designs halfway between a python script and something more lispy. This could well improve as I understand the underlying sequence / itertools glue a bit more, I'm often routing around confusing sequenced things. I absolutely enjoy writing little scripts like this in it, and I think I maybe enjoy it more than I would if I was writing plain python. I gave some thought about why this might be and I think I figured it out.

    It could just be as simple as being all about the code editing. Python, and it's whitespace delimited blocks, is fine, and super readable, but it's always slightly fiddly to edit. Some of this is my toolchain, I'm sure. There's a lot of bells and whistles you can glue over emacs for Python work, and they're pretty good, but I do always find it a slightly fiddly experience. Balanced expressions and sexprs though are obviously an absolute joy to edit in emacs, alongside an embedded inferior lisp repl, and although it's nowhere near as integrated an experience as using slime with a "real" lisp, it's closer to that than editing Python ever feels, and for me that's a significant productivity win. So I think it will stay in the toolbox.

    I recommend Hy to anyone who is interested in interesting lightweight languages, especially scripting languages. Obviously it's particularly relevant to anyone who likes python or lisps, even if just as a curiosity. If you work with Python and like using emacs though, and like the sound of 'Python but with structured editing' I would strongly recommend you look at how it might integrate into your workflow.

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  17. 2010-12-18

    This Christmas, we're going to be hosting for a small subset of family. I've volunteered to do the cooking myself. I would like to ensure that Mrs S gets a chance to have a rare day off from domestic catering. I don't really trust myself in a kitchen, so I'm looking to keep things straightforward. Some of the guests are fairly strict vegetarians, and so I've opted to go for that reliable cliché, the Nut Roast. I've never made a nut roast before, at least not one that didn't come from a packet mix. So this evening I've decided to go for a trial run.

    I got a recipe from DDG . The one I decided to go for was this Waitrose recipe . I think I was mostly attracted to the notion of mixing in brown rice. Although the recipe is straightforward, there has turned out to be a moderate amount of prep work, and I think I'll need to get as much of that prepared in advance of Christmas day as is plausible.

    The final worry is the somewhat temperamental old oven in this rented house. I'm only really used to working with reliable, fan-assisted electric ovens. This one is gas, rather undpredicatable and worn. To date, I've never successfully managed to so much as re-heat oven chips in it.

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  18. 2010-12-18

    It's been almost a year since I moved back to London. It seems like a year unusually blessed with snow. This morning, it was coming down thick and fast, and we had a freshly carpeted common, almost entirely to ourselves, aside from a handful of other dog walkers.

    Snow Day! /flickr]

    Snowballing a dog never loses it's appeal. He constantly appeals for you to throw one. The most fun is lobbing them skywards, in an easy parabola, giving him plenty of time to position himself below the descent, for an ariel catch. These are accompanied by a loud grunt, then a rough landing, wildly shaking the snow from the face. Then straight back into appealing for another.


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  21. 2010-12-14

    Map of Metal : This is a lot of fun to play with. Metalheads love a subgenre.

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  22. 2010-12-10

    John Hicklenton R.I.P. : Hicklenton blew my mind when I was a teenager, with his wild, hyper-stylized frantic run on Nemesis. Utterly absorbing and inspirational.

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  24. 2017-12-30

    I'm sick of Twitter, folks. I've decided to do something both mild and drastic about it. For 2018, I have resolved to stop using it.

    I am not sure what it is for anymore, it certainly doesn't feel like it is for me. I think I've been disengaging slowly for the last couple of years, and in 2017 I repeatedly found it too aggravating, and depressing to engage with. I think I would have already ragequit, had one of last year's resolutions not been that silly selfie thing. Thus a seed was planted about resolutions and exits. Brains often work that way. (Referendums are silly though)

    I was late to twitter. I downloaded my twitter archive, whilst I was scraping out all of the 2017 selfies, and apparently my first tweet is from Dec 2007.

    I was late to Battlestar Galactica as well.

    I probably spent a little while reading twitter before registering, although I don't remember anything specific. I can't remember why I signed up in the first place. Looking at that first month of odd, stilted entirely quotidian status posts, I can tell I'm working on Logical Bee, mostly alone, babysitting that dog. It's winter. Maybe I'm lonely? I have a dim memory of thinking it was pretty dumb for a long while before getting involved at all. I remember fiddling about connecting it to things, and experimenting with SMS tweets and emails. I don't think it really clicked for the longest while. I remember a sense of a clique I wasn't ever going to be able to get into. That first wave of web-natives, younger than my generation. More entuned to a web of application services and APIs than hypertexts and data servers. I remember tweetups being a thing, and a Bristol one being announced, and spending an hour or two before deciding firmly I wasn't the kind of person that went to that kind of thing. I quite wish I had gone now. I didn't used to be a very good joiner-in of things. I'm not much better at that now. A little bit, perhaps. Now I know to try.

    It took the longest while, but eventually it clicked. I liked the lightness of it. It was sort-of social networking, but social networking at arms length. Lots of irony, lots of whimsy. I just remembered the earliest phase of my binning Facebook was to convert my facebook to just echo my tweets back into it, for the muggles to read. I remember being very snobby and standoffish about things like hashtags and @replies. My first reply wasn't until August 2008.

    To Daveh! Either I don't know how to reply yet, or the Twitter archive has incorrectly threaded that reply back together. Either seems plausible.

    I didn't use a hashtag until May 2009. Even then I was repurposing "get off my lawn" meta-commentary. Amused to see that my next half dozen hashtags are complaining about moonfruit's use of them for viral marketing. Many years later I ended up working there for a season. Again we see the seeds are sown, and the fruit is reaped.

    Not too ashamed of that one. It's interesting looking back at tweets like that, I have a sense that the prevailing vibe of Twitter at the time was that the cool kids were beating out the idiots. I don't get that vibe off Twitter now.

    By this point it was clearly very firmly entrenched in my daily desktop routine. Once I got hold of smartphones that could run twitter, I think my usage ramped up. I remember by the time I got to last.fm, I was tweeting all the things, curating a couple of hashtags (#fantasypeelsessions for serendipitous word groups that sounded like band names, #fisharecool for cool fish facts), running multiple joke twitter accounts, writing bots, and generally really enjoying it. I remember when I got to Makeshift, and twitter seemed to be used as the wiring behind at least half of everything there, it then seemed like a necessary internet plumbing for web apps. With hindsight I think that was the peak. It was downhill from there. I don't like it any more, I have detected an opportune moment, and I have decided to leave. At least for one year.

    I'm not going to use this post for arguing about why I think it's broken. One of the largest problems I have with it is the sheer concentration of negativity. And one of the reasons I want to move away from it is to focus on building things that are more positive. It's not just Twitter. I'm pretty broken-hearted with the state of the web in 2017 - it's very far from what I signed on to help build as one of those idealistic Gen X web 1.0 types. And again, rather than just bemoan that, I'd rather start focusing on ways to think about fixing that. And for me, in 2018, this means I'm going to go small, and focus on building things and content I can own, in the sidelines. I expect I will be updating here more. I plan to double-down a bit harder on indieweb things, and federated stuff. POSSE all the things. Death to silos. I've been experimenting with micro.blogs and mastodon.social, and I want to play more with beaker and dat, and blockstack and IPFS and other idealistic p2p proto-webs. Maybe even frogans?. The real web looks more like that. Maybe I can help figure out how to make it a bit easier for everyone to clamber onboard.

    "But CMS, I think we're Twitter-friends, what does this mean for US?"

    First off, that's flattering, almost-certainly-entirely-imaginary-cms-fan, thanks! I like you too! Occasionally some of my tweets get as many as five or six engagements, and I do enjoy keeping up with some lovely people. Some of whom I met or perhaps only know through twitter. I'm sorry if this feels like a breakup; It's not you, it's me, as they say in the rom-coms. (Actually, I'm not dumping anyone.)

    Something else I want to push for in 2018 is better quality, stronger, social engagement. I want to cultivate more real contact, more high bandwidth engagement and connection with all the good people. This can work two ways of course. If you only really interact with me on a tweet by tweet basis, and you think you're going to miss that, then do please reach out. We can have coffee, or get beers, or just go fish in a lake or something else entirely. And I'm going to be pushing myself to reach out to more people in turn myself, something I'm astronomically poor at. Please help me with this if you can!

    IRL networking I plan to ramp up a bit. More meetups, tech and maybe otherwise. Maybe I'll rescind my conference ban. Maybe I'll start some of these things, or start helping to organise them more.

    I'm not doing an *infocide*. As well as publishing things hanging from here, which has plenty of RSS feeds, if you can still figure out how to integrate those into your workflows then I'll probably never be very far away. Also, if you look at the home page, there's a list of dozens of other not-Twitter platforms you can stalk me on or connect to me via (maybe we are already!) - If my plan comes together, I hope to be syndicating and updating the useful ones of these more actively.

    I don't intend to delete or remove my twitter account, and I will set things up so I still get notifications, so nobody gets ignored. I might even automate some notifications to my twitter feed about updates to things elsewhere. I'm just not going to be participating as a human. I expect I will remove all the apps, so my turnaround on mentions might slow right down.

    If you're in the select category of people who only know how to contact me with twitter, there are many options. I haven't changed my phone number, should you know me well enough to have one of those. If you're looking for a way to DM to me, I cannot endorse keybase strongly enough. I think they're trying to do something really interesting, and could do with some more network effect. Sign up to keybase, and keybase message me, I love getting keybase messages, and I always respond. Invite me to your keybase groups! Also, please share your slacks and your newsletters and your mailing lists with me, if you think I'd like them, or they'd like me.

    Email still works, and I still read it. My address is even on my website.

    Finally, if you're reading this, and we've Twitter interacted in some way, let me say a goodbye for now. If I was annoying, or argumentative, I'm sorry, I can be hard work soemtimes. Maybe some of that might have been caused by the platform? If I was fun or charming or interesting, then let's work to stay in touch! If you don't really care, you're not even sure how you got here from off of twitter, that's cool too, maybe I'll see you again in a year from now.

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  25. 2017-12-30

    With all this focus on RSS generation for micro blog, I've been optimising my engine. I've learned how to use SBCL's profiler, and I have shaved a third off the cost of generating indexes

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  26. 2017-12-29

    To think I used to worry about Disney Princesses

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  27. 2017-12-28

    Let sleeping dogs lie

    It's been a month now, and I ought to be used to it, and in many ways I am, but in surprisingly many ways I'm still not; I don't have a dog anymore. He got too old, and he got too sick, and tired, and uncomfortable, and he had to be put to sleep, back on the 28th of November. How does it feel? Terrible.

    It was an enlarged heart that did for him. Poetically enough, his heart was just too large for him to carry on. The photo above is taken on the last morning, before I headed out to work. I knew there was very little chance he'd be coming back from the vet's appointment later that day. We had a little conversation and I carefully explained to him that he was a very good dog.

    Of course he was actually a terrible dog. A brilliantly terrible one, as most dalmatians are born to be. He'd not really been himself for a couple of years, stumbling about and complaining about most things, but right up until the last couple of weeks he was coping mostly, and remained good company. In his prime though, that dog was an athlete, who used to literally fly, and if I open my mind's eye a little, that's what I can see, streaking around the Bristol countryside, barely controllable, raiding bins, and laughing at you, over his shoulder.

    I don't really know what to write. I have to write something though. This website, which has been knocking around for fifteen years or more, only really took initial form as a rudimentary 'blog' so I could share dog photos with his burgeoning fanbase. Most of that has bitrotted now, but when I feel better I would like to clean it up some. So I can't really even let go of him without marking some notice here. I don't need to trot out all of the anecdotes, they're probably dull and too personal. After all, outside of my immediate circles, he's just some bloke on the internet's dog. To me, and to some of his internet fans though, he's the best dog in the world. Every single word of that is true.

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  29. 2017-12-27

    When you have, as I have, a race condition in posting that exists somewhere between systemd, rsync, bash, perl, and that's before you even get to the CMS, it is probably time for some refactoring

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  30. 2017-12-27

    If I included an image maybe it would look like An image

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  32. 2017-12-27

    Shopkins movie, and perhaps a curry? I feel like death...

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  33. 2017-12-27

    Crash early, crash often

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  34. 2017-12-27

    Does anyone know if eating your own bodyweight in Stilton is a good way to clear up Xmas flu?

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